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Stone Age worm egg hints at origins of modern scourge

A PARASITIC disease affecting 210 million people globally may have stalked humanity since ancient times. Schistosomiasis infects people when they wade in freshwater containing the parasitic flatworms.

A team led by Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge found an egg in a 6200-year-old grave at the Tell Zeidan site in Syria. It is the earliest case of the disease in the world, says Mitchell.

Significantly, Tell Zeidan is in the Fertile Crescent, where crop irrigation was invented 1000 years earlier. The thinking is that farmland there was irrigated with large pools of standing water that carried the parasite. This, plus the fact that modern irrigation spreads the disease, supports the idea that this is the first example of an ancient technology spreading a disease, says Mitchell (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, doi.org/tcm).

This article appeared in print under the headline “Ancient irrigation spread disease”